Contents

For this week’s editorial we took a quick look at the Ubuntu Portable project. The “first look” article offers you a quick preview of the new eyeOS 1.8.5 web operating system. Last week we took Wolvix 2.0.0 Beta for a test drive, so don’t forget to check out the results! In the Linux distribution announcement section you will find the following releases: Fedora 11 Beta, CentOS 5.3, AsteriskNOW 1.5.0, VectorLinux 6.0 Light, Parted Magic 4.0. In other news: The new Nvidia video drivers for Linux bring support for newer GPUs; The KDE community announced KDE 4.2.2; Ubuntu Podcast intreviews Mark Shuttleworth. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated last week and the development releases.

All this begs the question of which OS platform would Nokia choose? The N810 runs on a Linux variant known as Maemo, which includes a Nokia-developed Gnome application framework dubbed Hildon.

Hildon in turn has been adopted by Ubuntu for their Intel-endorsed Mobile Internet Device Edition, while the Intel-founded Moblin project is built around the Gnome Mobile platform. This already gives Nokia some entré into the world of Linux and Atom-powered devices.

“The most important thing that we want to figure out is how to have participation without conflict. It is very clear that, in order to challenge Apple, we’re going to have to make a lot of changes. Nobody would make the case that the free software environment, whether on Ubuntu or any other distribution, is a world-beating experience from a design and user perspective. It’s world-beating for other reasons, right? But it certainly doesn’t win from a design and user perspective.

“If we’re going to put ourselves at the forefront, we’re going to have change a lot. That change is going to be controversial and difficult, and it will not serve our purposes at all if that becomes an excuse for vicious argument. The folks with passion need to get invested in it, either as part of a process like the GNOME 3 discussion, or as part of the Ayatana effort that Canonical is leading, or just by diving into their favorite application and being passionate about user experience.

Today Linux is the go-to operating system for high performance computing, while it continues to extend its footprint in the broader IT community. In the financial services arena, in particular, Linux is being seen as a critical technology for increasing ROI.

On Monday, at the High Performance Linux on Wall Street conference in New York, Inna Kuznetsova, director of IBM’s Linux Strategy, led a panel that discussed how Linux can be used to reduce costs and improve performance in these economically challenging times. We recently got the opportunity to ask Kuznetsova about the increasing profile of Linux for IBM customers and how the technology is enabling them to realize cost savings.

Kernel Space

The journey that begin during last football season with the realization that Microsoft paid Jerry Seinfeld $10 million for his appearance in their ads is almost over. The judging for the We’re Linux video contest has been completed and I’m pleased to announce the finalists.

NVIDIA had ended out March with five Linux display driver releases with it ranging from a day to a week between updated Linux drivers were pushed out from this Santa Clara company. It’s been just over a week since their last display driver release, but it looks like April will be another month of fierce Linux/Solaris/BSD driver updates from NVIDIA.

Applications

I was lately impressed by Marble Desktop Globe, a free, open-source application for KDE4 which includes a 3D atlas of the world, with lots of features and an interface similar to the one of Google Earth.

Desktop Environments

There has been some work going on to improve the tabbox (alt+tab) when no effect is used. Andreas Pakulat added an outline for the currently selected window like it was in KDE 3 time. Very nice and usefuel – thanks a lot. The tabbox has received some face lifting and uses the Plasma style. On that part I want to thank Nuno for his great help on making the whole thing nice. Adding some pixels here and there – I could not have done it.

So, here’s what I think I will say about the State of GNOME talk the Collaboration Summit this week. Feel free to add points in the comments or point me to more info. (If you are going to be at the Collaboration Summit and would like to help give this presentation as a member of GNOME or help with QA, let me know!)

The last time I installed Debian was version 3.x and it was a little intimidating for me. I had only installed Fedora before that and Debian did not have a GUI installer. But I was able to figure it out and get it up and running without too much trouble. Now with Debian 5, there is a GUI installer supported and I want to check it out and see how it compares to Anaconda and the other GUI installers I’ve seen.

The RC2 release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring (code name Estephe) is now available. This RC2 version provides some updates on major desktop components of the distribution, including KDE 4.2.2, GNOME 2.26,X.org server 1.6, kernel 2.6.29.

Red Hat

President Obama came to office with the promise of change. His administration has pledged to create an environment of openness and participation. Some have already called him the “open source president” such as consultant and CNN contributor Alex Castellanos.

There’s no better time than now. Transparency builds trust. Participation solves problems. And we believe that open source provides an answer.

Red Hat is excited that the Obama administration recognizes the value of open source beyond software. Open source principles are changing how we learn, how we share information, how developers create, and how companies do business. Now it has the opportunity to change our government.

Sometimes, you have to respect someone for sticking to an opinion and a vision. Other times, you have to wonder if a consistent vision becomes a fatal flaw. I’m still undecided about whether Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has the correct — or flawed — long term vision: In a New York Times article, Whitehurst (pictured, right) once again dismisses speculation that Red Hat will pursue the consumer Linux desktop and smart phone markets. Here’s why.

Ubuntu

If you’ve never tried Linux or haven’t tried it in a long time, this may be the time you’ve been waiting for. Virtually all Linux Distros have a free for download version that you can burn to CD or DVD and test drive as a Live-CD. You boot your computer from the Live-CD and try Linux without any changes being made to your hard drive. It will run much slower in Live-CD mode, but you will be able to see for yourself the goodness that the Open Source world has to offer as well as see if your computers hardware is compatible.

I have been through the phase when I tried to inspire people about using original software and operating system so that we do not use pirated software. This is sort of illegal activity to use pirated software and it also does not help you use your computer system that efficiently. However, Ubuntu has clearly given a way ahead while advocating for Linux.

The upcoming Fonera 2.0 802.11g wireless router from FON uses Linux as its embedded OS and includes several new features. The Fonera 2.0 allows FON community members, refered to as Foneros, to share their internet connection, in effect providing a ‘public’ hot-spot, in return for reciprocal free roaming Wi-Fi access from other Foneros. FON even provide an opportunity to make money because non-members can buy Wi-Fi access by purchasing a FON Access Pass. Whenever this happens FON credit the owner of the hot-spot with 50 per cent of the revenue (via PayPal). FON is supported by BT and the new BT Home Hub wireless routers, are also FON capable. In addition BT FON members have access to BT Openzone Hotspots.

Sub-notebooks

But Philip Solis, an analyst at ABI Research, questions the “reliability” of this evidence.

Solis said in a March research note that Taiwan’s MSI had not yet shipped a Linux-based Wind at the time of the comment to the magazine. When it did, it did “adapt” the operating system for the netbook’s smaller size — an key ingredient to Linux’s acceptance by consumers, Solis wrote.

Acer, Asus and Dell have all built customized versions of Linux for their netbooks. Solis said that Asus has noted equal return rates for Linux netbooks versus those running Windows.

And while ABI’s surveys show U.S. consumers clearly stating their preference for Windows netbooks, Solis said that isn’t true around the world.

In Asia, netbook buyers are both thriftier and “and not as tied to the Windows environment,” Solis said. “They’re looking for certain features, but they aren’t as tied to a certain brand name.”

Solis predicts an increase in Linux netbook shipments this year, from 25% to a third of the 35 million netbooks expected to sell globally this year. Under that estimate, Linux will be shipped on 11.5 million netbook PCs in 2009.

Solis is bullish about his prediction because of the coming ARM wave. With Microsoft still balking at porting Windows 7 to ARM’s mobile CPU, PC makers using ARM have no choice but to use Linux.

Open source application developers shouldn’t rely on users’ willingness to jump through hoops. An app may be less expensive and have other advantages over the competition offered by mainstream vendors, but it’s not likely to succeed if it demands effort users aren’t willing to expend or expertise

I’ve typically been pretty conservative when choosing a web server. Typically, I’ll use Apache to run most sites, and possibly Lighttpd for static files. Experimenting never really has been something done with a web server once I’m past the initial setup.

Mozilla

Following the tradition of using national park names as code names for Firefox releases, Mozilla has chosen Namoroka, located in Madagascar, for the development cycle that started a few months ago when Mozilla decided to branch the current Firefox 3.5 (Shiretoko) and proceed with the development of the next release in the trunk (Minefield).

Mozilla has unveiled its roadmap for Firefox 3.6, which is codenamed Namoroka. This version, which will follow the upcoming Firefox 3.5 release, is expected to arrive in 2010. Mozilla has some highly ambitious plans for 3.6, including a new task-oriented user interface paradigm and deep integration of Prism-like rich Internet application functionality.

Healthcare

In reality there is a component of HIMSS that is FOSS-friendly and FOSS runs as an under current at every HIMSS conference that I have attended. It can be hard to find but it is there.

[...]

Two less people die every day at Midland b/c of the systems in place to handle central-line infections inside OpenVistA. Wow. That means that Medsphere clients are starting to get VA-like improved outcomes. All at a fraction of the cost of the proprietary alternatives

Open source software from Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) is enabling the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to build a secure, open technology platform to connect federal government agencies and health information exchanges in a “network of networks”–the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN)–built over the Internet.

Mayo Clinic and International Business Machines (IBM) have reportedly launched a Web site for the Open Health Natural Language Processing (OHNLP) Consortium to establish and promote precise open source-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) information recovery from vast silos of information.

Internet

click2try today announced the availability of three new Open Source applications in its catalog, including OWL Intranet Knowledgebase, KnowledgeTree Document Management Software (Community Edition), and eGroupware. The addition of these popular Open Source applications expands the collaboration, document, and file sharing capabilities available to click2try users. This increases the number of Open Source applications to more than 40, that users can try and use on-demand from the click2try.com site. click2try (http://www.click2try.com), a Community site that features a catalog of virtualized Open Source software, has also announced the addition of major upgrades of Eclipse, OrangeHRM, and TikiWiki to replace older versions already in the catalog.

But cloud computing is going to change the industry in as profound a way as client server did in the late nineteen eighties to nineteen nineties. The ability to easily provision and scale up software services based on the Free Software LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL /PHP or Perl or Python) or more modern fare such as the open source Java software framework Hadoop is going to massively change the way software is developed. Of course at my day job, it already has for many of the engineers.

Even old fogies like me are going to have to learn some new tricks in this world. Free Software is going to have to adopt as well. I still have lots of Samba code to write first (no, Samba isn’t a finished product yet), but if I ever work on cloud computing code, I’d like to see it under the AGPL, in order to preserve the freedoms I’ve been able to enjoy in conventional software development these many years. Without the AGPL, our freedoms will depend on the kindness of strangers donating their modifications to our code back to us, as they did in the days before the GPL license and the FSF was born.

The new-look bundling of software components significantly reduces the complexity of evaluating and acquiring an enterprise web CMS application by making all key MySource Matrix CMS elements available out of the box (and free of charge) under its primary GPL open source license.

Government

The prime minister also decided to allocate VND676 billion ($39.7 million) to 11 projects, including the building of a website on software and content industry, a fund to develop software and content industry, a digital information standard system and information exchange standards, an IT complex, and the developing of a software industry and digital content nursery.

Dia is a commonly available package for a Linux users. It’s an all-around diagramming tool, actually. From UML diagrams to ERDs, to flowcharts and other diagrams I am not familiar with (Sybase, Cisco, electric), it seems to be your one-stop app. I can’t open Visio (VSD) files with Dia though But it’s better than nothing, if I were to draw a diagram from scratch, that is.

Activists of the Free Software Movement clarified that the recent reports in a section of the press saying that the withdrawal of Open Document Format (ODF) Alliance award to IT@School executive director Anvar Sadath had some political connotations, were completely misplaced.

Open Access/Commons

Here is an alphabetical list of online mathematics books, textbooks, monographs, lecture notes, and other mathematics related documents freely available on the web. I tried to select only the works in book formats, “real” books that are mainly in PDF format, so many well-known html-based mathematics web pages and online tutorials are left out. Click here if you prefer a categorized directory of mathematics books. The list is updated almost on a daily basis, so, if you want to bookmark this page, use the button in the upper right corner. Here are the books….

Copyrights

On Tuesday, April 7, the National Federation of the Blind will protest in front of the Authors Guild headquarters, at 31 East 32nd Street, New York City. The protest criticizes the Authors Guild’s bullying of Amazon to get them to shut of the Text-to-Speech functionality on the Kindle 2. The Authors Guild demands that blind people wanting this added and enabling technology must either submit to a burdensome special registration system and prove their disabilities or pay extra for the text-to-speech version.

Given some of the Associated Press’s recent actions, this won’t come as a surprise, but the AP has now announced that it will start suing any news aggregator that doesn’t share its profits with the AP:

“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories.”

I’m a bit curious what those “misguided theories” are… because copyright law and rules concerning fair use seem pretty clear, and search engines aggregating info and sending people to your site has been ruled fair use before.

Demand for services offering anonymity, such as virtual private networks (VPN), has skyrocketed as internet users react to the new IPRED law which came into force in Sweden on Wednesday, Svenska Dagbladet reports.

Microsoft's charm offensives against Free/libre software are proving to be rather effective, despite them involving a gross distortion of facts and exploitation of corruptible elements in the corporate media

A British MEP criticises Battistelli and the management of the European Patent Office (EPO) while Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe, UK Minister for Intellectual Property, gets closer to Battistelli in a tactless effort to improve relations